1. First and foremost, we finally shipped the long-awaited Camino 2.1, bringing a significant under-the-hood upgrade to all of our users, as well as a completely-rewritten autocomplete system for the location bar. The new version shipped in only six languages, but our hard-working localization teams are readying three more languages for Camino 2.1.1.
2. In addition to Camino 2.1, we released three security updates for Camino 2.0 and three milestones on the road to 2.1, for a total of seven releases shipped in 2011.
3. At the end of March, Mozilla announced the end of Gecko embedding, and as a result, we issued a blog post on the future of Camino.
4. We found ourselves very fortunate that there was no tinderbox excitement in 2011; the most exciting change in that area of the project was when I finally turned off Camino 2.0.x builds in December.
5. While there were no large website projects (or problems!) in 2011, we did do a significant update of the site content, both text and images, to coincide with the Camino 2.1 release. In addition, Samuel Sidler started a special project that he has yet to complete.
6. Once again the composition of our development team shifted as life and job changes impacted the free time of our all-volunteer team. In particular, this resulted in a virtual hiatus in the spring as many of these changes coincided. Thus, for most of 2011, only Stuart Morgan and I were actively working on Camino code—and not always regularly even then. Philippe Wittenbergh continued to help out with graphics and design, as well as QA and user support, where Chris Lawson pitched in as well. I enjoyed spending more time working on Camino code but sadly found myself stretched thin due to my older build and release, website and documentation, and support responsibilities.

Coming so close on the heels of Camino 2.1 and after such an exhausting year, this summary feels a little bit like it’s just a quick rehash of my Camino 2.1 release post—perhaps, for once, this annual post is an abbreviated one. Still, it provides an overview of the year’s major events in the world that surrounds our favorite web browser. As always, I want to thank the entire Camino community—developers, testers, localizers, users, and friends—for all of the help and support in 2011; Camino could not have made it this far without your contributions.

2012 is the year in which Camino turns 10, which is both exciting and bittersweet. I remain hopeful for the future over the coming year and look forward to diving back in to Camino work as the holidays wind down (and, in particular, shipping Camino 2.1.1 soon). If you want to help build the future of Camino, please do join our development discussion list—perhaps one of your New Year’s resolutions is to help develop your favorite browser? So here’s to 2012; together, let’s make it a great year for Camino!

Scripting is the new literacy. A hundred years ago, the dividing line was the ability to read and write. Today, it’s between people who can code simple things, and those who can’t. It’s so liberating to have an idea and be able to bend the computer to your will. I’ve found that of the most rewarding experiences in life is to create something that provides a useful function for other people. There’s an intrinsic goodness in it, like how I imagine what a true craftsman would put into a chair, table or door. You build it for the ages.

While I disagree strongly with the beginning of the quoted passage, and somewhat with the end, the middle rings true with me. I enjoy being able to write simple things to help me accomplish a task, and sometimes those pieces of “software” are even useful to others. Like many before me, I started finding my way around the Camino codebase and attempting to pick up Objective-C and Cocoa in part to fix things that bugged me, to bend Camino to my will (to paraphrase Matt).¹ And although I’ve gotten great satisfaction out of fixing some bugs that have bothered me or have required some persistent debugging to fix, the most rewarding fixes—then and now—have been ones that have helped out others. It certainly isn’t saving the world, but if some code I write solves a problem someone else is having and makes their life just a little bit better or easier, it’s time well-spent.

Wishing you all the best this holiday season.

¹ The other part of my reason for attempting to pick up coding was to provide more manpower and help keep development moving—something with which nearly all small open-source projects could use a hand. ↩

The road to 2.1 has been longer—and I think harder—than any of the prior release journeys I’ve been a part of, dating back to the long-awaited 1.0. While work on 2.1 began even before 2.0 was done (Dan Weber’s Summer of Code autocomplete work was already on “the trunk” when 2.0 was released), things really got going in early 2010, when Christopher Henderson banished Mork history and nearly single-handedly got Camino building and running on both Gecko 1.9.1 and Gecko 1.9.2. Unfortunately, the devil was in the details, and we (mostly heroic hacker Stuart Morgan) spent an inordinate amount of time tracking regressions caused by Gecko changes that ignored or didn’t work properly in embedding clients like Camino.

Still, we pushed onward, joined for a time by Chris Peterson (who made a significant contribution after Christopher Henderson had to cut back his involvement), and with a brief return visit from Camino 2 feature hero Sean Murphy alongside contributions from Camino stalwarts Ilya Sherman, Chris Lawson, and Philippe Wittenbergh. In all, we fixed approximately 400 “bugs” (problems or new features) on the road to Camino 2.1, with 15 different people contributing (for the very first time, and I hope the last, I topped the list, with 195 fixes—although about 50 of those are website changes¹). Still, it was a much longer process than we had hoped or wanted, but as I noted with the previous major release, Camino 2.1 is still a major improvement over Camino 2 and a triumph for an all-volunteer, all-free-time development team in today’s world of corporate-produced browsers.

Sadly, due to increased demands on the time of our hard-working localization teams, Camino 2.1 is going to launch with a record-low number of languages—just six—though three more will be be available again in future updates. If your language is one of those missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (Localizing doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge, and the updates required for languages that previously shipped in Camino 2 are not as comprehensive as with past releases; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language!)

For the first time ever, I believe, both Sam and I managed to get a full night’s sleep before a major release! The website was all ready beforehand, although we have few tweaks and changes that were safe to postpone until after the release.

The road to 2.1 has been, for me, a grueling journey, as if I were sprinting a marathon and, at times, simultaneously herding cats. Between development team changes, monkeywrench bugs, and a trying spring, I am exhausted. I am, however, incredibly grateful to everyone who has contributed to this fine new release—developers, reviewers, designers and artists, localizers, testers and bug reporters, and the rag-tag “support staff” working in Bugzilla and on the forum to address problems—and to getting Camino 2.1 shipped to our users. It has been an honor and a privilege.

I may manage to take a short break that’s actually a real break and then jump back into fixing bugs for Camino 2.1.1. Beyond that, it’s still hard to say. If you have any development experience and would like to contribute those skills and your time, please join us on our development discussion list to help us chart the future of Camino.

In the meantime, however, enjoy Camino 2.1; we hope you find it familiar but better, like an old friend fresh from new experiences.

¹ At least another handful of my remaining bugs were other non-code-related changes, and by lines of code or significance of patches, though, Stuart is still going to come out ahead. ↩

Sunday night Stuart and I landed the last two bugs we’d been waiting on for Camino 2.1 Beta 1, so our final preview is now code complete. There is still some release note- and website-related work to be done before we can build and ship Beta 1, but we’re close enough that you can start counting down the days!

In all of the cases we have successfully debugged so far, users have had corrupt or invalid fonts which have, in conjunction with the font handling changes in Mac OS X 10.6.7, caused Camino to crash. Luckily, there is a relatively simple series of steps you can take to restore stability to your OS and prevent Camino from crashing:

1. Validate your fonts using Font Book; remove or disable all fonts with errors or warnings, as well as any duplicate fonts.
2. Restart your Mac in Safe Mode to clear the OS font caches (which contain data for the corrupt or invalid and duplicate fonts you removed/disabled in step 1).
3. Restart your Mac normally, and Camino should no longer crash from these font-related crashes while browsing.

If Camino still crashes after removing corrupt, invalid, and duplicate fonts and restarting in Safe Mode, please post in the support forum so that everyone can help further debug your problem (and please include links to crash reports you’ve submitted for these crashes).

Special thanks to Philippe Wittenbergh for his always-expert memory of the steps necessary to resolve font cache corruption.

Lately I’ve come to understand the rationale behind those hat tricks; after digging through a bunch of code to understand it and be able to fix the bug you’re after, it makes sense to go ahead and tackle other bugs in the same code. So, recently, I’ve been channeling smfr, fixing sets of bugs in our save code, in our HTML bookmarks export code, and in our pasteboard and local-file-decoding code, among others. They’re not smfr-level fixes, but they are fixes that have removed many longstanding bugs (and, in the case of HTML bookmarks export, improved the ability of that export to serve as a backup without significant data loss). And, in the end, they keep moving Camino forward, and that’s what really matters.

Wevah stopped by #camino on Sunday to help Sam fix a server migration-related website bug we’d just discovered. Before the day was out, not only had Wevah fixed that site bug (Regex Jesus to the rescue!), but a second one as well.

Even better, he fixed a three-plus-year-old “blocker” Colloquy bug 10 minutes after I mentioned the bug to him (it’s almost as if he scares bugs into fixing themselves).

The best part of it all is that Wevah’s awesomeness rubs off on everyone around him; after Wevah finished his bug-fixing spree, I looked again at a bug that had been stumping me for some time (Wevah had actually given me the hint that allowed me to fix said bug’s predecessor) and was then able to re-arrange some code and get things working.

Fixing bugs is never more fun than when Wevah is around; everyone should be so lucky to work with Wevah on a project sometime.

And that, my friends, is why Wevah is awesome!

Camino started 2011 off with a bang, as Stuart Morgan landed both of his large, long-awaited patches: the history loading rewrite and the autocomplete performance rewrite (the latter begun originally by Dan Weber). As a result, typing in the location bar is now smooth as silk once again, and the autocomplete results are a lot more awesome. If the poor typing performance in the location bar has kept you away from nightly builds, you can make the jump now without fear (as always when switching to nightlies, be sure to make a backup of your profile first). Stuart also debugged, fixed, and landed his patch for a focus bug that prevented form fields on some pages (such as Google web applications) from being focused, and he dusted off another old Dan Weber patch to partition off the feed and security icons at the far end of the location bar.

Returning after the holidays, I landed Chris Peterson’s patch to finally make the Downloads window use the proper selection color. In addition, I started work on what appeared at first to be a simple follow-up to that patch, a fix to make the selection color behave properly when the Downloads window was in the background. (Alas, it did not end up being simple at all, but with some help from Ilya Sherman and Stuart, I completed my first major code refactoring, and I was able to land the patch late last night.) I also pushed a few website changes and started working on the release-wrangling tasks leading up to Camino 2.1 Alpha 1.

Chris Lawson initiated our first major CLOSEME sweep of old unconfirmed bugs of the year, setting us up to close many abandoned bugs next weekend for a good start to the year.

In addition, we’ve been very happy to meet a few Camino users who are interested in helping with development and triage (perhaps it was a popular New Year’s resolution in the Camino community? ). Regardless of the reason, as an all-volunteer project often limited by the human resources available to us, we’re always grateful for every contributor. If you’re interested in getting involved with Camino development or bug triage, feel free to stop by our IRC channel, let us know what your skills are, and find out how you can help. (Similarly, if you speak a language other than English and want to help with the localization of Camino, please visit the Camino Localization project’s website and subscribe to their mailing list to learn how you can help.)

And that’s it for the first week of 2011. I’m off to continue working on release-wrangling for Camino 2.1 Alpha 1, which we hope to have available soon. In the meantime, enjoy the improved autocomplete performance in the nightlies, and let us know if you find any lingering issues!

For Camino, 2010 was an interesting year, a year of many transitions. We had more changes in our teams than in past years, as Sam headed off to travel the world (and most of his responsibilities fell to others) and as successful careers took off for other contributors. Although 2010 was the first year since I began these years-in-review that we did not ship a major new version, we made many significant changes in the hectic first half of the year that laid the foundation for bigger and better things to come.

1. We shipped five security and stability updates to Camino 2 during the year, including fixing several long-standing bugs; our localization teams continued to supply release notes and update descriptions for these updates in all 15 languages. We also released Camino 1.6.11, one final security and stability update for our Mac OS X 10.3.9 users.
2. Camino 2 was a finalist for Best Independent Browser and Best Mac Browser in the 2010 About.com Reader’s Choice Awards (in the former category, Camino was the only browser nominated that didn’t run on Windows, and we finished second in the voting).
3. Camino built across six different branches in the course of the year, from Gecko 1.8.1 (Camino 1.6.x) all the way to the latest, Gecko 1.9.3.
   • In February, Christopher Henderson got Camino building on Gecko 1.9.1 (with some help from me, and from some earlier efforts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build newer Gecko versions).
   • The very next week in February, Christopher got Camino building and running more-or-less as expected on Gecko 1.9.2, and I started producing the first of many experimental builds while we fixed lingering issues and worked on building “out-of-the-box” with that version of Gecko, a process that lasted until late May.
   • Following up on the work to get Camino working on Gecko 1.9.2, in early June Stuart Morgan almost single-handedly got Camino building against mozilla-central (Gecko 1.9.3), before we were slammed into a brick wall of embedding-unfriendly code and massive Gecko platform changes that were taken after the platform had reached the beta stage! (Because of those issues and the focus by Mozilla platform developers on bugs related to Firefox 4, we put the mozilla-central experiment on hold and concentrated our efforts on the places that would bring the most benefit for our users.)
4. Christopher also wrote a very significant patch that moved Camino from the old, creaky Mork history to the newer SQLite-based history backend; combined with 2009’s autocomplete rewrite and the move to Gecko 1.9.2, Camino finally became free of the trinity of Bad Old Mozilla Technologies (Mork, RDF, and XPFE).
5. Camino development moved from CVS to Mercurial, and our volunteer development team adapted to the many changes brought by the new system. (Stuart learned his 1001^st different version control system in service of Camino, and I learned about the wretched, buggy state of Mercurial’s CVS import tools, spending the better part of a month trying to coax a workable import out of that software.) In addition, I put together build automation for our new Gecko 1.9.2-based repository and nightlies.
6. After getting nightlies based on Gecko 1.9.2, most of our attention during the year was on the lingering issues with the new (slower) history and autocomplete implementations, and to a lesser extent on focus regressions from the Gecko focus rewrite. This was an area where the strains and limitations of an all-volunteer project became evident in 2010, as many of us spent about half the year living with a slow location bar. Dan Weber started working on fixes early in the year, but he was pulled away by school and other things; Stuart picked up the work and, as time permitted, slowly iterated through what became a significant rewrite of both the autocomplete code and parts of the history user interface code. (The thoroughly-rewritten code, which landed in the first week of 2011, works very well, and everyone will see it in an alpha very soon.)
7. Our “fun with tinderboxen” in 2010 was not nearly as traumatic as in past years. Although both of our 10.4 tinderboxen—our original Xserve, cb-xserve01, and our last PowerPC tinderbox, cb-minibinus01—went down for a several weeks during the year, both were resurrected successfully (although cb-minibinus01 came back running Mac OS X 10.5, which was not ideal, but better than losing our last PPC box entirely). In addition, at the beginning of the year, we brought a brand-new Xserve, cb-xserve04, online, which gives us some headroom for the future (in addition to producing our Camino 2.1 development nightly builds). While Sam did most of the work of setting up cb-xserve04, I handled the setup of the other two when they returned to us, leaving me fully versed in tinderbox setup.
8. While Camino websites have been trouble-free for quite some time, Camino Planet did suffer an outage where it failed to update due to errors after a bizarre SSH outage on our server. Our major website project in the second half of the year involved moving to a newer, better-configured server (as our host was decommissioning our current one); Sam did most of the work on that project, and afterwards we were able to deploy a number of website changes that we had wanted to be able to do for some time. The other significant event in the website department was the introduction of Flash version checking (a joint effort from Stuart, Philippe, Sam, and me) on the welcome page shown after installing or upgrading Camino; the notifications have made a noticeable difference in ensuring Camino users are updating Flash to get that plug-in’s latest security and stability fixes.
9. The composition of our development team was in flux again this year, reflecting the nature of a volunteer project. Many of those who carried Camino through 2009 and the Camino 2 release moved on to new jobs or lucrative careers as indie Mac/iOS developers, while others had to cut back commitments. In addition to Christopher’s and Stuart’s efforts mentioned above, highlights of our developer cadre included the following:
   • Towards the end of 2010, Chris Peterson showed up and began fixing assorted bugs, mostly in the Downloads window and in our menu code (though he has additional patches in flight touching scarier stuff, like focus!).
   • Sean Murphy (who contributed significant features to Camino 2) made a brief reappearance to update our gesture support for Gecko changes, and Ilya Sherman performed his first code reviews. Philippe Wittenbergh continued to keep us looking good with website fixes, new icons and images, updated CSS, and he even ventured into the realm of small code and Makefile fixes.
   • Although Sam insisted that I be listed on the Programming team beginning with the Camino 1.6 release, I had never really felt like a “developer” previously (in addition to ad-blocking, I mostly touched project file changes and, after some tutelage by mento, various build system-related fixes). However, in 2010 I finally started producing fixes to our Cocoa/Objective-C code on a somewhat-regular basis; I learned a little more about debugging and began investigating and, where I could, fixing things that annoyed me! I also ended up fixing several bugs in Gecko that blocked our 1.9.2-based builds or were regressions, and I worked on extending a number of changeset-related Gecko build system features to work in cases where an application is built using code from multiple repositories (as is true for every Gecko-using application other than Firefox). So, in 2010 I learned (and forgot!) a good bit of Objective-C/Cocoa (and some Perl), and I finally felt like I could play a developer on TV. While I’ll never be able to have a large impact like writing new features or performing significant code surgery and refactoring as our Cocoa stalwarts do, I can still help by fixing some small things, in between my other responsibilities in build and release, website and documentation, and bug-minding. As we often say, every additional developer counts.

So there’s a belated look at the many highlights (and some “lowlights”) of Camino in 2010. Although sometimes it seems like less happened in 2010 than in years past, looking back on the year reveals many large changes; they were just sometimes slow to develop and often were not exciting, user-facing changes. Nevertheless, we find ourselves on the cusp of a great new Camino 2.1 Alpha as the new year opens!

Finally, I want to take a moment to extend thanks again to the entire Camino community: our developers, our testers, our localizers, our users—the folks posting in the forum, writing AppleScripts, and filing bugs; those who take time to blog, tweet, and make videos about Camino; and especially those who help out with user support and bug triage—and our friends. All of you make this great little browser possible, and we’re grateful for your contributions, your continued support, and your love for Camino. Here’s to a great 2011!

In addition, I’ve talked with Sam about either sharing or having him take over the Camino update “responsibilities” this year, in order to provide more timely updates than I’ve been able to produce recently. (Edit: Look, he’s already posted the first one!)

Finally, my annual Camino Year-in-Review post is still coming (if only people would stop interrupting me!), so there is still that to look forward to before I possibly go radio-silent for a while.